My name is Graham Daldry, and I am best known as the advertising writer who invented Should’ve gone to Specsavers. Before I worked in advertising I was an academic whose main preoccupation was that the idea of fiction could save us from both post modern reductionism and religious transcendentalism. I have more recently been researching the implications of quantum theory for philosophy and criticism and I have just published a new book, called Quantism: A Science of the Imagination. You can find out more here

These posts were mostly written between 2014 and 2017 and explore much of the thinking in the book. You can read the posts by following the drop down menu under HOME. 

Quantum physics is a set of robust scientific laws which categorically refute all kinds of materialism as the means of perceiving our existence. It refutes in particular any application of Darwinian determinism insofar as it is precisely that, a means of predicting and understanding future human or animal behaviour. Although we might regard what did evolve as inevitable in retrospect, the maths dictates that literally anything else could have happened and may yet. Contingency can only be calculated as chance, and in the maths of probability there is by definition no rule that discounts the unlikely. This fact also defeats scientific determinism and dataism for the same reasons. There may well be no past event that cannot be analysed and fully understood by means of data but equally there is no future event it can reliably predict. The random action of emotion in our decision making – like the wave motion of particles in the physical universe – makes all predictive analysis worthless. The next position might be literally anywhere and anything.